Abstract
The legitimacy of constitutional and supreme courts increasingly requires an effort, by the courts themselves, to establish a channel for direct communication with the public. This paper briefly analyses the practices that some courts (the Supreme Courts of the United Kingdom and the United States, the French Constitutional Council, the German, Italian and Spanish Constitutional Courts) have developed for this purpose, highlighting the growing importance of new instruments that are allowing the courts to bypass the intermediation of traditional information media. In this respect, the Internet has played a key role; however, in the near future, the main instrument is most likely to be social media.
Paolo Passaglia is Full Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Pisa; pro-tempore Scientific Coordinator of the Comparative Law Area of the Research Department, Constitutional Court of the Italian Republic.
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The principle was strengthened when it was enshrined in the Constitution: see the Constitution of 1791, Title III, Chapter V, Article 3 of which reads as follows: “les tribunaux ne peuvent s’immiscer dans l’exercice du pouvoir législatif ou suspendre l’exécution des lois”. Borrowing from Montesquieu’s words, this downgraded “la puissance de juger, si terrible parmi les hommes” to a function “pour ainsi dire, invisible et nulle” (de Secondat de Montesquieu (1748), Livre XI, Chapitre VI).
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Reference is made to the “Counter-Majoritarian Difficulty” evoked by Bickel (1962), p. 16 ff.
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See Justice Robert Jackson’s majority opinion: West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, at 638 (1943).
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Speech delivered at the Chamber of Commerce, Elmira, New York, 3 May 1907 (published in Addresses and Papers of Charles Evans Hughes, Governor of New York, 1906–1908, New York, 1908, 139), when Evans was State Governor. Shortly after (in 1910), he was appointed Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, a position he maintained until 1916. He then returned to the Supreme Court in 1930, as Chief Justice.
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This argument was made during the session of 13 October 1981, in reply to the centre-right opposition’s protests against the law on nationalization that was to be passed.
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Favoreu (1988).
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Moïsi (2008), p. 5.
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McLuhan (1994).
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de Secondat de Montesquieu (1748), Livre XI, Chapitre VI.
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Popper (2002), p. 29.
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Communiqué du Président du 10 mai 2016, http://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/conseil-constitutionnel/francais/actualites/2016/communique-du-president-du-10-mai-2016.147341.html.
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The reform of the style of drafting the judgments of the Constitutional Council was also analysed by one of its members: see Belloubet (2017), p. 7 ff.
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See https://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/decisions: for each judgment, its text and the official comment is provided and freely downloadable.
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This warning is included in all judgments of the Supreme Court, together with a reference to the judgment in the case U.S. v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 US 321, 337 (1906), in which the Court addressed the issue of differences between the syllabus and the judgment. The Court clarified that the text drafted by the Reporter of Decisions is not official: the syllabus “gives his understanding of the decision”, and nothing more.
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This drawback could not be eliminated by conferring official and authoritative character upon the syllabus. This occurs, for instance, with the summaries of the judgments of the Canadian Supreme Court, which are not separated from judgments, and must therefore be considered as a part of it (in fact, the syntheses are also sent for official translation). The authoritative nature of the synthesis could avoid interpretations and expectations arising from non-official texts, devoid of any legal bases; nevertheless, precisely this authoritative nature would exacerbate the problems deriving from any conflict there may be between the synthesis and the actual judgment, because, in this case it would be very difficult to identify objective criteria to solve the conflict.
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The peculiarities of the press releases issued by the Italian Constitutional Court are analysed by Gragnani (2013), p. 531 ff.
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It should be noted that the press conference, in addition to being open to journalists, is also broadcasted live on television. The audience that the event manages to attract, however, is rather limited, also because the conference is held in the morning.
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The Bulletin is freely available at https://www.venice.coe.int/WebForms/pages/?p=02_02_Bulletins.
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Passaglia, P. (2019). Institutional Communication as a Means to Strengthen the Legitimacy of Constitutional Courts. In: Pinto de Albuquerque, P., Wojtyczek, K. (eds) Judicial Power in a Globalized World. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20744-1_24
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